Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (14 page)

But me? I couldn't see anything I did that compared even remotely to art. I viewed my job more as an extension of myself on the basketball court. I was the point guard who kept everyone involved. After all these years, I still felt like I was diving for loose balls as they headed out of bounds, and then slamming them off my opponent's kneecaps so our team could get an extra possession. Which, the way I looked at it, is all about smarts and hustle. So when Tony Bennett called me an artist, it really made me stop and wonder what the hell he was talking about.

It was through Tony's son that I came to understand. Danny had done more than revive his father's career. He'd given his dad the freedom to sing and paint whenever he wanted without ever having to worry about money again. He'd protected his father's integrity so that Tony could sing and paint with a clear conscience. He'd given an artist the time and the freedom to be an artist. When Tony talks about this gift, an expression of awe fills his face, as if his
son's
work is a work of art.

It's not that I reinvented Tim's life after we became partners. But there are moments when I can really relate to Danny. Of course, I never could have given Tim that moment at Tony's concert without all that he had given me. But that was the nature of our partnership. He had vision, and I had the ability
to open doors, bring people and information inside, and help make his ideas a reality.

If things were reversed, if Danny were on stage and Tony were making the deals, we wouldn't be seeing either of them at the Grammys. My partnership with Tim would be a disaster if I were locked in a cold, dark room and left to miraculously turn numbers into huge ideas. Or if Tim had to remain in the center of a group of people and pay attention to details. Tim was the kind of guy who found himself in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman smashing her high heels on his car and her husband's toupee in his hands. What better copilot was there for him than the son of a man who knew how keep an airplane level in turbulence?

Combined, Tim and I are definitely entrepreneurs in the best sense of the word. Our talents give people opportunities they might not otherwise have.

There are an infinite number of ways for an entrepreneur to impact someone's life. You could put out computer software, like Bill Gates, and make your product so important that people can no longer live without it. You could give people an incomparable moment by flying them into space—like Richard Branson. Or you could take over a hotel, create jobs, and put money in the pockets of employees who then have a chance to go after their own dreams. When you give someone an incomparable moment or a chance at a dream, that's when what you're doing borders on art.

If there were only
one
person at The Nugget that we were able to give that moment, it wouldn't have taken Tony Bennett long to recognize him. Tony is very conscious of how difficult it is for a young singer to find a place where he or she can learn the craft and get exposure. For the reality TV show, Tim and I brought a young singer into our lounge named Matt Dusk. Just
as Tony was the old master in a tuxedo who could be appreciated by young crowds, Matt was the young singer in a tuxedo who emulated the old masters.

Tony Bennett was one of Matt's idols and one of the reasons he wasn't back in Canada running his dad's box factory. So when Tim and I told him we'd try to get Tony to come see him sing in the lounge, he was overwhelmed.

All day long, Matt's band was teasing him about it, saying they'd just heard that Tony was in a certain part of the hotel, and then cackling as Matt ran off on a wild goose chase to go meet him. On Saturday night, Matt went on stage and sang, but Tony was running late. Matt went through his prepared numbers and, thinking Tony wasn't going to show, he got ready to call it quits by singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco
.
” He was in the middle of the song when he saw Tony come through the door.

There was this comical “1-2-3” moment when Matt alerted the band to switch in midsong to a new number. He just couldn't bear to be caught stealing Tony's song in front of Tony. It's a moment Matt still laughs about today. But Matt will also be able to tell his grandkids about the moment Tony Bennett applauded as he finished his show. That's a moment I think of when you ask me what an entrepreneur can do.

Being an entrepreneur meant giving Matt the chance to meet Tony Bennett. It's showing The Golden Nugget to six students I mentor at the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy and allowing them to see their lives as a canvas that can be a work of art. It's giving every employee at the hotel the chance to merge diligence and creativity in their jobs. What we did at The Golden Nugget was unique. No corporation could have created what we did in the same way. We'd wrapped the old days into the new and made it personal. If we didn't have Dinah
Washington coming through the front doors with two suitcases and saying, “I'm here, boys,” we had Tony Bennett's daughter playing in our lounge. Tony understood exactly what we were striving to do, because we'd brought back the day when the performer could be friends with the boss. We'd both given each other what we love about yesterday.

Over time, we became closer and closer with Tony. Which is why I felt like I could ask him if he'd do a little sketch of Tim and me.

Tony's artwork is amazing. If you looked at his painting
Monet's Gardens No. 2
, you might think it came off the brush from a famous nineteenth-century French impressionist. His watercolor of the Golden Gate Bridge moves you as much as “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” does. Tony's artwork is so good it hangs in galleries and museums around the world. But when Tim heard that I planned to ask him for a sketch, he was aghast.

“You can't do that, Tom! It's like asking somebody to borrow money. What if he says no? Everything is screwed up after that.”

“I think he might
like
to do it,” I said.

“Do you know what the odds are that he says no? Plus, you're gonna put him on the spot. You don't want him to say yes because he feels obligated.”

“I'm not gonna put him on the spot.”

“Tom, don't do it. It will be really embarrassing.”

But as much as Tim hit the brakes, I just couldn't let him stop me. One night, the three of us were at dinner and I started to bring it up. Tim threw up his arms in a funny way and distanced himself from the table. “Tony,” he said, “I got nothing to do with this!”

But I simply asked him.

“Sure!” Tony said.

“Reallyyyyyyyy?” Tim asked, and his voice got so high and squeaky at the end of that “really” you'd have thought it was coming from the squarest of squares from Barnsville.

“Yeah,” Tony said, “send me some photos. I'd love to paint a portrait of you guys.”

Some time passed. Then one day, the painting arrived. If my partnership with Tim was not a work of art before that day, it is now.

“My most prized possession,” Tim will tell you, “even if it is in
Tom's
house
…”

I
f your best buddy ever looks up, sees himself magnified into the size of King Kong on the largest screen in the world, turns to you in disbelief and says, “I never saw my head so big,” you can be sure of one thing. Trouble is around the corner.

Maybe things were going too well. One day, Tim was dealing blackjack to the Sopranos, and the next I was being called up to the stage to perform a song with the Barenaked Ladies. We had not only captured the feel of Vintage Vegas with Tony Bennett, we'd also grabbed that elusive buzz that comes when cab drivers are talking about you, and everybody is wondering what you're going to do next. When a party that we were throwing got a mention in Norm Clarke's morning gossip column, we knew we'd be jamming that night.

Part of our plan to keep The Nugget on the lips of every cab driver was our reality TV show. There have been many other shows
about casinos over the years. But most had been set up to mimic reality. We were opening our doors to something new. We were allowing the cameras access behind the scenes. Like everything else we did at The Nugget, we were making it personal.

From the moment we linked up with Mark Burnett, I figured all he had to do was point a camera at Tim, and the show would be a huge hit. When you've got your own Joe Pesci, how can you miss?

A few days before Tim, even met Burnett, he was talking on his cell phone as he drove into the valet at the Bellagio when he hit the gas instead of the brakes and rammed his Mercedes into another car. The airbag inflated and twisted his knee. When he showed up to meet Burnett a week later hobbling on a cane and explaining what had happened, the producer began to laugh. “Hey,” Mark said, “save a little drama for the show!”

Perry was sure Tim would make a great television character—and that I'd compliment him well. But Tim didn't want to do it. He didn't like the idea of being followed around by cameras twenty-four hours a day. He was a private person to begin with—which is an understatement when you consider that I'd begun to call him Howard Hughes. He was concerned that he'd be portrayed as a compulsive workaholic and that I'd come off looking like a playboy. But most of all, Tim was against surrendering creative control.

I certainly didn't want to give it up, either. But if we were writing out a list of pros and cons about whether to do the show, the list of pros was far longer. Mark Burnett may have been born in London and served as a paratrooper in the British Army, but he'd certainly become a master at locating the pulse of mainstream America.
The Apprentice
was topping the ratings for NBC, and
Survivor
routinely attracted more than twenty million viewers for CBS. Burnett was offering us hundreds of
thousands of dollars to put our brand before six to eight million people week after week for an entire summer. You couldn't buy advertising like that. To give you an idea just how much exposure that is, that's roughly
ten
times as many viewers as the MTV
Real World
show got when it set seven strangers in a luxury suite at the Palms Hotel a few years earlier. And
that
was a smash success.

Granted, it's not easy to make a television hit, and Burnett didn't have the lure of a competition in our show to keep viewers hooked like he did on
Survivor
and
The Apprentice
. But if he could work his magic, who knows, maybe our logo would start to pop up all over America like Donald Trump's “You're Fired!” hats. The timing seemed perfect. We'd be getting Burnett at his peak. Not only were
The Apprentice
and
Survivor
shining back in 2003, but Sylvester Stallone was working with Burnett on a boxing reality show called
The Contender
and Steven Spielberg was talking with him about another project that would come to be called
On the Lot
.

While Tim could see the potential in all of this, he never would've made this deal if he were on his own. This was one of those rare cases where he hit the brakes while I gunned the gas. I couldn't see it at the time, but I was already drinking the Kool-Aid. I'd gone to college to be the next Bob Costas, and though a reality show is much different than being a sportscaster, it was still television. TV had a powerful allure to me, and I didn't understand the world I was driving us toward. One of the disadvantages of always wanting to dive into new situations is you're constantly going to be naïve at first. I had no idea just how much Kool-Aid was waiting for me—or how much I had the capacity to drink.

Perry had been around. He wasn't drinking any Kool-Aid. To him, the show made sense on its business merits. So he put
his foot on the gas pedal, too, and after awhile the deal just sped ahead. We all signed on with high hopes to do
The Casino
with Fox. But underneath, Tim wasn't putting his trust in the form or Burnett. He was trusting my instincts and Perry's judgment.

As soon as Burnett arrived in Vegas, he put us all at ease. We were truly impressed. When you get an inside look at the unique way he devises sets and thinks about character development, you quickly understand why he's a master at what he does. Burnett wouldn't have taken the show on if he didn't think it had the potential to be great. The only thing he really had to do was point the cameras at our reality.

There are plenty of casinos that invite celebrities in for publicity. But nowhere else would you find the owner of the joint on the floor dealing blackjack to the Sopranos. And, of course, Tim being Tim, he got us into hot water when he jokingly dealt only good cards. (“Oh, what's the matter? You don't like that one? How about this one?”) We got fined for that little indiscretion. But even the gambling regulators understood that Tim was simply acting as if he were in his living room.

I guarantee you, nowhere in all of the concrete palaces lining The Strip would you find a happier casino owner than Tim. Or any owner using the master key to open the door on one of his sleeping customers at three in the morning, and then jumping on that customer's back. But that's just what Tim did with our pal Fritz.

When Tim noticed Fritz's girlfriend, Biata, wheeling a suitcase through the casino floor at almost three o'clock in the morning, he hustled over to find out what was wrong. Biata told him that Fritz had tossed down a few too many and gone to bed early while she'd stayed at the tables. When she arrived at the room, he was furious that she'd returned so late. “Only whores come in at this hour,” Fritz fumed. Naturally, an argument
ensued, and the next thing you know she'd packed her suitcase and was rolling it through the casino floor with tears streaming down her cheeks. Tim led her back up to the room, opened the door with the master key, and jumped on top of Fritz.

“You gotta make up with Biata!” he pleaded. “I will not have her crying in the middle of my casino at three in the morning!”

Fritz rubbed the fog out of his eyes, smiled, and the next thing you know he and Biata were hugging and kissing. When Mark Burnett said he envisioned our show as
The Love Boat
on steroids, I imagined this is what he was talking about.

You could develop a natural plot line just looking at the situations that Tim got us into when he opened up the limits. One time, Johnny D. called in about a whale from Europe who played roulette. Nobody in Vegas would give him the game he wanted. Johnny D. wanted to know if Tim would let the guy bet more than he could anywhere else in town.

The guy wasn't coming in on a line of credit. He'd be bringing millions straight to our cage. If he lost, we wouldn't have to wait thirty days for him to pay his marker, or worry whether he'd try to stiff us. We wouldn't have to negotiate a lower payment with him. The money was ours. All we had to do was let him put more money down at The Nugget than he was able to at any other roulette table in Vegas—and then beat him.

To Tim, it was like Fort Knox calling to get a game.

“Talk about a dream customer,” he said. “There might not be ten guys like him in the world.”

The guy was already in Vegas. We didn't have to send a plane for him. We didn't have to so much as offer him a suite. All we had to do was give him a roulette table and then allow him to bet his millions.

To Tim, the temptation was unbearable. Roulette, he knew,
is one of the worst games a player can play. It's not like blackjack where The House edge is only a small percentage. There's absolutely no skill involved. Of the countless bets you can make on a roulette table, none of them are very good—while a lot of them are
really
bad.

So you could almost hear the voice of Bob Martin echoing in Tim's ears.

“If you think you got the best of it…”

But…

The odds pay so well on some of those lousy bets, that if the guy put a mountain on the table and won, he could take us down in an avalanche. Take down the whole house! Tim. Me. Eugene the showroom manager. Ken the singing waiter. Drew the smiling bellman. Reinaldo the world's greatest window cleaner. Everyone.

But…

He'd have to be extraordinarily lucky to do that.

“We have so much the best of it,” Tim said. “I can't
not
take him.”

This bet was bigger than the money. Because—and I'll never be able to get this point across strongly enough—it's not about the money for Tim. Money is just a way that Tim keeps score of how well he handicaps life. This bet got to the core of why Tim wanted to own a joint in the first place.

Gigantic corporations with a wide range of hotels and billions of dollars in assets wouldn't give this roulette player the game he wanted. They wanted no part of this guy because they were no longer truly in the business of taking bets. That gnawed at Tim. He hated that most casino revenue in Vegas was now coming from the restaurants, shows, clubs, and shops. The 70 percent that did come from the casinos was dropped into slot machines—which Tim didn't consider gambling at all. It both
ered Tim that every time the sun came up, Vegas was further away from the day when Benny Binion would give a rich guy with cancer a chance to plunk down everything he had on one last spree at the Horseshoe just before the poor bastard kicked the bucket. Or when Benny's son, Jack, allowed anyone to come into the Horseshoe and bet any amount he wished. Your only limit at the Horseshoe in the good old days was your first bet.

That was what Tim wanted to bring back. This roulette player was giving him a chance to be a Binion back in the day when it didn't get any better than being a Binion. So it came down to this. Would Tim take the bet that nobody else in Las Vegas would take?

The only request the roulette player made was that we didn't hock the game—that is, put nine pit bosses around the table.

“Yeah,” Tim couldn't resist. “We'll do it.”

The roulette player was a classy guy. He came in wearing a sports coat and tie on a Saturday afternoon. Talk about tension. For an hour, that roulette wheel was spinning at that table. It was just the guy in the sports coat, the dealers, and Tim. All you had to do was point cameras at Tim's face, the chips on the green felt, and the spinning roulette wheel. Tim couldn't smile or cringe or jerk his head to check bets on the table once a number was called. He had to act perfectly calm on the outside though anyone could tell that his stomach was doing somersaults.

After that hour, the guy in the sports coat turned to Tim and extended his hand. As they shook hands, the guy thanked Tim for the game. It didn't get any better than that moment for Tim. He'd taken the bet that nobody else in Vegas had the balls to take—and won a million bucks.

Now, you couldn't find suspense in a casino any more natural than what led up to and took place during that hour. The
trouble was, that didn't appear on our reality show. Nor did Fritz and Biata. Nor did the Sopranos.

A little after 9:00
PM
on June 14, 2004, our heads grew fifty feet tall, and reality was never the same.

Tim and I threw a red-carpet party at The Nugget on the evening
The Casino
made its debut. The festivities filled the entire hotel and spread out along Fremont Street under the giant canopy that has an underbelly lined with more than twelve million bulbs to make it the world's largest LED screen. This screen hovers about ninety feet overhead and is longer than four football fields. All the space under that canopy next to the hotel was packed with people. Downtrodden downtown suddenly looked like Times Square on New Year's Eve. Tim and I could barely move as we stepped into the crowd to introduce the show.

From the angle at which we stood, our bodies appeared contorted on the canopy screen. It was as if we were looking at ourselves in a fun-house mirror. When I think back on it now, that image couldn't have been more telling. Everything Tim and I were working toward was about to be twisted and distorted.

It's not just that the reviews turned out lousy, or that the governor of Nevada would ask us what the hell was going on. We were about to learn what could happen when you don't pay careful attention to a partnership.

There is a photo of Paul McCartney and John Lennon during the best of times that Perry Rogers keeps in his office. He keeps it there to remind himself: don't fuck it up. Whether a partnership is as creative as the one between the two Beatles during the good years, or as strong as the one between Perry and Andre, it needs to be constantly nourished. No matter how close two people are, no matter how much they achieve together, there's always the possibility of a wreck and a split. If that goes for the best of partnerships, you can imagine what
might happen to a partnership that was no deeper than ink on paper. As soon after he'd put us at ease at the outset, Mark Burnett had disappeared.

We knew he had to shuttle between some far-flung island to shoot
Survivor
and New York to work with Donald Trump. So we understood. Occasionally, Tim and I would look at each other and say, “What happened to Burnett?” But we figured he was on top of things wherever he was. By the time we realized there was a problem, our heads had grown to fifty feet, and it was too late.